by Alan Schom
Nevertheless, despite the vastly overwhelming odds, Bonaparte now deployed two Guard battalions between Hougoumont and La Haie Sainte, ordering Ney to spearhead another drive with an additional seven Guard battalions across the Ohain Road, even as he ordered a final heavy artillery barrage against what remained of Wellington’s center. At seven o’clock that evening, just as Napoleon was about to give the signal for the final counteroffensive, he heard a loud artillery barrage to the northeast. It was Blücher’s fourth and last remaining corps arriving from Wavre.
Despite knowing that it was futile to go on, Bonaparte lied to Ney, informing him that it was Grouchy. They were saved. With cheers of “Vive l’Empereur!” echoed thousands of times by his troops, Ney gave the order to charge. Advancing smartly forward, seventy-five men abreast, the seven Guard battalions in a “dark waving forest of bear-skin caps” advanced, but then accidentally divided, while across much of the line French troops advanced in support. Ney’s force continued forward, coming under heavy fire of the musketry of the brave Dutch-Belgian infantry, while Wellington’s troops lay concealed on the other side of the Ohain road. Suddenly confusion erupted, as the extreme French left flank came under unexpected fire from the British emerging through a cornfield. Wellington, in his blue coat, white buckskin breeches, and gold Spanish sash from his peninsular days, stood up and waved his hat, signaling the Allies to counterattack all across the line. The moment had come.
When Ney’s troops were fewer than sixty yards away, some forty thousand Allied troops suddenly appeared from nowhere. Sending a stream of lethal volleys into the ranks of the stunned Imperial Guard. The Allied soldiers charged with bayonets, and the Guard’s drummers suddenly broke off the “pas de charge” as the French Imperial Guard broke and fled. Forming three Guard battalions into squares, Napoleon hoped to check the flight of the other Guard units, but shouts of “Sauve qui peut!” drowned out his orders.
By eight o’clock that evening, even Napoleon had to admit that he had lost. He “entirely disappeared,” as Ney summed it up, without even notifying Ney or any other commander of his intentions. It was shades of Egypt all over again. “A complete panic at once spread throughout the whole field of battle,” one official French battle report read, as the greatest army in the world fled in pandemonium. “In an instant the whole army was nothing but a mass of confusion,” Ney later recalled, “and it was utterly impossible to rally a single unit...Even the cavalry squadrons accompanying the Emperor were overthrown and disorganized,” deserting Napoleon. “I owe my life to a corporal who supported me on the road and did not abandon me during the retreat,” Ney acknowledged.
Bonaparte was forced to abandon his coach at Genappe, along with all its contents — the gold, banknotes, diamonds, sister Pauline’s necklace, and his personal papers. He grabbed a horse and galloped south, followed only by Drouot, Bertrand, and his staff, Grouchy executing a similarly swift retreat before Wavre.
Meanwhile, behind them, units of Gneisenau’s cavalry were beginning a pursuit, as the victorious Duke of Wellington and Prince Blücher finally met at 9:30 P.M. at the Belle Alliance Inn, the Prussian army band striking up “God Save the King.” It was only now that Wellington realized what a beating Blücher had taken back at Ligny and what remarkable endurance he must have had to continue. After many toasts the two men discussed their immediate plans for a coordinated advance on Paris, though it took all Wellington’s efforts finally to dissuade Blücher from executing his pet project of vengeance by blowing up the Pont d’Iéna and other war memorials and buildings in Paris, not to mention executing Napoleon himself. “Blücher wants to kill him,” Wellington afterward related, “but I advised him to have nothing to do with so foul a transaction.”
Napoleon, after turning over the command of his troops to Marshal Soult, beat a hasty retreat to Laon on June 20, reaching the Elysée Palace at 5:30 A.M. on the twenty-first, after having told Bertrand back at Philippeville: “If I return to Paris and have to get my hands bloody, then I’ll shove them in right up to the elbow!”[796] The French people and the Allies had different ideas on the subject, however.
France left 25,000 dead and wounded and 220 cannon on the now silent battlefield of Waterloo and a total of 64,602 men during the entire Belgian campaign. The Allies suffered 62,818 casualties.[797] Dazed, bruised, and disillusioned, Napoleon now sat in the library of Hortense’s home at Malmaison, lost in another world, far from thoughts of future battles, for that he had given up. Instead he was again reading Alexander von Humboldt’s study of America, his Voyages et Contrés Equinoxiales du Nouveau Continent, which he had earlier discussed with poor old Gaspard Monge, at sixty-nine now a mere shadow of his former self. So much had changed, but Monge and brothers Joseph, Lucien, and Jérôme, had promised to come with him to seek refuge in America. Napoleon planned elaborate fantasies — explorations “from Canada to the tip of the Horn. Henceforth, without any army and empire, only the sciences remain strong enough to attract me.” “I want to start a new career, leaving behind some works truly worthy of me,” he had told Monge.
A devoted Hortense had welcomed him to Malmaison on June 25, breaking the news of Josephine’s death. He now wandered around the eight-hundred-acre estate, seeking Josephine’s ghost. “That poor Josephine,” he murmured. “I cannot get used to living here without her. I always expect to see her emerging from a path gathering one of the flowers she so loved. She was the most graceful woman I have ever known.” he confided to Hortense in a rare lapse into sentimentality.
“I am sorry to see you in Paris,” Caulaincourt had greeted him on his arrival at the Elysée on Wednesday, June 21. The army, he insisted, was the only source of Napoleon’s power and safety. Now it was all over, too late, there would be no more fresh armies, no more mass call-ups of nonexistent recruits. Instead he reread old leatherbound volumes of Humboldt. “Tell me frankly,” he said, cornering the faithful Regnault, “it’s my abdication they want, isn’t it?” “Given the current situation,” he replied, “I believe it preferable if Your Majesty were not to oppose it and instead to offer it of your own accord before the Chambers demand it.” Lucien had protested: Napoleon must “assume dictatorial powers, put France under martial law, and call upon all patriots and good Frenchmen to come to its defense.” Napoleon looked at this younger brother who had never carried a rifle in his life, forever living in a world of dreams. He had been gone too long and simply no longer knew the country. It was no longer 1804.
Then Napoleon received an urgent message from the Chamber of Representatives, declaring itself in permanent session and warning him that any attempt by him to dissolve it would be considered “a crime of high treason.” “Peace with the Powers is not possible unless you hand over Bonaparte,” Lord Castlereagh’s half-brother, Sir Charles Stewart, frankly told General Lafayette. “I hope it [Napoleon’s reign] comes to an end quickly,” Lafayette told Joseph Bonaparte, for this was no time for mincing words. “The truth has been revealed at last,” Henri Lacoste declared before the Chamber of Representatives, “You know as well as we do that it is against Napoleon alone that Europe has declared war.” Whether Napoleon agreed or not, he was now mentally defeated. With the whole of France rising against him, he had no choice.
The following day, Thursday, June 22, a small delegation from the chambers presented Napoleon with their ultimatum to abdicate. A beaten Napoleon acquiesced, signing his “Declaration to the French People” that same day:
At the beginning of the war to maintain our national independence, I was counting on the union of all our efforts. But since then the circumstances appear to me to have changed, and I hereby offer to sacrifice myself to the hatred of the enemies of France. My political life is over, and I proclaim my son, under the title of Napoleon II, Empereur des Français.
Then he had moved to Rueil and Malmaison, even as 66,000 Prussians and another 52,000 men under Wellington were driving through France heading directly for Paris. Napoleon now found himself a virtual prisoner at
Malmaison, on War Minister Davout’s orders, although Generals Bertrand, Gourgaud, Montholon, and the two Allemand brothers were also staying with him. “We were continuously on the alert,” Hortense recalled, Napoleon appearing to be the only person quite indifferent to all that was taking place about him, literally living in another world. “You will guard all avenues and all sides leading to Malmaison,” Marshal Davout had instructed General Beker. “The interests of the country require that the evil-doers be prevented from rescuing him and using his name to cause uprisings in the country.” Hortense was horrified by these measures.
“What will you do there?” a bewildered Fleury asked Napoleon about his decision to seek final asylum in the United States. “They will give me some land, or I shall buy some, and we will cultivate it. I shall live on the products of my fields and flocks.” But if that was not possible? Fleury persisted. In that case, “I will go to Mexico, to Buenos Aires, or to California, or if worst comes to worst, I will travel from sea to sea until I find a sanctuary against man’s evil and persecution.” Clearly he expected to find no justice in the world.
Meanwhile, in Paris, Naval Minister Decrès took Napoleon seriously, ordering two frigates near Rochefort, La Saale and La Meduse, to prepare to receive Napoleon, his family, and staff for the journey to the New World, although they could not move without British safe-conduct passes. To be sure, the British had other ideas on the matter, an exhausted Prime Minister Lord Liverpool confiding to Lord Castlereagh, “We wish that the King of France would hang or shoot Bonaparte, as the best termination of the business.” Although Lucien told Napoleon he would go personally to London to plead with the British, he instead simply bolted, à la Bonaparte, returning to Italy again, even as Jérôme fled to Germany. Sauve qui peut.
*
In Paris, immediately following the news of the French defeat, Napoleon’s government had been swept aside and replaced by a five-man Executive Committee headed by none other than the resilient Joseph Fouché. On June 23 it sent its plenipotentiaries — including La Fayette, Benjamin Constant, and General Sébastiani — to negotiate an immediate armistice in order “to save the country.” The abdication forced upon, and accepted by, Napoleon on June 22 “automatically returns the nation to a position of peace with the other Powers,” Fouché’s official letter to the Allies read, “since their only aim had been to remove him.” But, he continued, the Allies now must “renounce without reservation any plans to again place the French government under the Bourbon family,” creating instead a regency in the name of Napoleon’s son. The Executive Committee also demanded that the Allies “stipulate the safety and inviolability of the Emperor Napoleon once he has left his territory,” with Napoleon choosing his own place of exile. Needless to say these proposed terms, arrogant and unrealistic, were dismissed out of hand by the Prussians, and the new acting French foreign minister, Bignon, had to submit new proposals, while Fouché personally favored establishing the duc d’Orléans on the throne.
With 110,000 Allied troops already ringing the French capital and hundreds of thousands more on the way, Davout, the acting war minister, acknowledged the inability of the French to gain anything by further resistance. At a war council convened at Villette on Saturday, July 1, it was agreed to surrender, to avoid “dismemberment of France, [and] the pillage and devastation of the capital.” Early the next day Fouché called an emergency meeting of the ruling committee, preparing the eighteen articles of the armistice to be called the Convention of Paris, which were completed and signed on Monday, the third. Davout then personally brought the document to the Allies, at the Neuilly bridge at six o’clock in the morning of the fourth. All parties duly signed then and there. It was over at last — or almost, for in much of the country, the “white terror” was unleashed, long-suppressed royalists attacking and murdering Bonapartist supporters, perhaps in the thousands, and among them, Marshal Brune.
“Who would have ever thought that I would see the emperor of the French held prisoner at Malmaison!” Hortense exclaimed in a rare moment of anger, as Napoleon was ordered to pack his things in two carriages and leave for La Rochelle. Of the entire Bonaparte clan, only Joseph remained faithful to the end, willing to accept exile with Napoleon in America. One last-minute appeal to General Beker to persuade the committee at least to permit Napoleon to head an army in defense of France — “I offer my services as a general only, still considering myself the first soldier of the land” — had been rejected with outraged laughter.
And then the day came to leave, as Hortense quietly handed Napoleon a present he had long ago given her, a two-hundred-thousand-franc diamond necklace, as he stood in the Cour d’Honneur for the last time, looking back. “How beautiful Malmaison is, isn’t it, Hortense. It would be wonderful to be able to stay here.” Then he turned, his shoulders stooped, and climbed into the unmarked caleche with brother Joseph and General Beker, with Generals Gourgaud and Montholon, along with Las Cases in a second carriage and his staff and younger officers in a third. And thus on June 29, 1815, General Beker now gave the orders for them to set out for the coast.
Reaching the port of Rochefort on July 3, General Savary exchanged one hundred thousand francs in banknotes for gold, which Marchand then sewed into a dozen leather money belts. On July 7 Prussian troops duly made their victorious entry into the French capital. At 10:00 P.M. the next day Napoleon and his party were rowed from Fouras (opposite the Ile d’Aix) to the frigate La Saale, where the ex-emperor was received by a cool but correct Captain Philibert. “Once [he is aboard] the frigates must put to sea within twenty-four hours,” read Decrès’s sealed orders to Philibert, and they were then to sail “as quickly as possible...landing Napoleon and his suite either at Philadelphia or at Boston, or at such other port of the United States as would be promptly and easily reached.” La Saale did not even raise its anchors, however, for blocking the channel was the seventy-four-gun British ship of the line, the mighty Bellerophon, a famous veteran of Trafalgar. When Savary, Las Cases, and General Lallemand met with Frederick Maitland, the captain of Bellerophon, to obtain the passes required to permit them to sail, they of course were denied. Maitland had been authorized, however, to receive Napoleon and his entire party and to convey them to England.
Although Joseph proposed going aboard Bellerophon posing as his brother, thereby permitting Napoleon to escape, the latter would have no part of it. He was too tired for any more delays and ruses. As he confided to General Bertrand on July 14, “it is not without some danger, in putting myself in the enemy’s hands, but it is better to risk confiding oneself to their honor than to be handed over to them as de jure prisoners.” No English gentleman would do what he had done to the duc d’Enghien and to so many others. “I have concluded my political career,” Napoleon now wrote the Prince Regent of England. “I come to take my place before the hearth of the British people. I place myself under the protection of their laws...as that of the most powerful, most consistent, and most generous of my enemies.”
A little after six o’clock the morning of Saturday, July 15, 1815, Napoleon was piped aboard Bellerophon, receiving full honors, and escorted to the captain’s own cabins, which he had vacated for his special guest. As the sails were unfurled and they put to sea, Napoleon watched the shores of his empire slowly fade from sight, Joseph sailing in another ship for the United States.
Meanwhile, after Bonaparte’s hundred-day fiasco, France found its frontiers reduced again, this time to those of 1789, and the country was ordered to pay a war indemnity totaling seven hundred million francs, while foreign troops occupied the land. On July 24 the restored Louis XVIII took his revenge, the reprisals beginning with a list of fifty-seven officials and soldiers — including nineteen marshals and generals — who were accused of high treason. Orders for their arrest were issued.
Davout protested directly to the Tuileries, for the list was very selective indeed, omitting Fouché, Decrès, Caulaincourt, and Davout himself. These “officers have merely obeyed the orders
I gave them in my capacity as war minister,” he argued. “Therefore you must replace all their names with mine alone.” When the king ignored this request, Davout wrote secretly to those named “to think about their safety,” warning them that they had not “a moment to lose.” The celebrated cavalry hero, General Lefebvre-Desnoettes, was last seen vanishing in the guise of a traveling salesman — but minus his enormous mustache, while General Lavalette escaped from a stone cell in the Conciergerie disguised in his wife’s dress. Ultimately only five had the misfortune to be captured — including the twenty-nine-year-old newly promoted Brigadier General La Bédoyère, as he was bidding adieu to his wife — and executed. Another fourteen generals and politicians were condemned to death in absentia, while others were dismissed from office or banished, including Bassano, Boulay de La Meurthe, Cambacérès, Carnot, Defermont, Fouché, Masséna, Regnault de Saint-Jean d’Angély, Merlin de Douay, Quinette, Thibaudeau, and of course the wily, ingratiating Soult, while Grouchy managed to have himself declared “incompetent to stand trial.”
There was to be one more execution later. At 9:20 A.M. on Thursday, December 7, Marshal Michel Ney found himself standing before a firing squad in a Paris street. Having refused to kneel and be blindfolded — “a man such as I does not get down on his knees” — he stood there defiantly. And then as the commanding officer shouted, “Apprêtez armes!” Ney said, “I protest against my judgment...Soldiers, straight at my heart!” “Joue! Feu!” As the drums rolled, twelve musket balls riddled his body, three of them shattering his face. The only marshal to have been captured — after betrayal by a fellow French officer — Ney had been tried before a court of 150 peers in the Luxembourg Palace and found guilty the day before his execution. Of the court, 5 peers had appealed for clemency and 17 had called for deportation, while 122 had demanded the death penalty, among them Ney’s four fellow marshals Perignon, Kellermann, Sérurier, and Victor, not to mention the pink-cheeked Admiral Ganteaume and numerous generals, including Beurnonville, Compans, Dessolles, La Tour-Maubourg, Lauriston, Maison, Monnieur, and Soulès.